Study: Gifted children benefit from bypassing school for university

While his kindergarten classmates were learning to tie their shoelaces, Jacob Bradd was solving algebra problems. By third grade he was working his way through a university calculus textbook. And at 13, he blitzed HSC extension maths after only knuckling down to study a week from the exams.

It was this astonishing progression that propelled him to university this year, where he began full-time study at 14, the youngest student on campus at Wollongong and among the youngest nationwide.

Reservations: Jacob Bradd's parents were concerned that attending university at a young age might affect his social life. Credit:Greg Totman

For his parents, it was difficult to decide what to do with a child too intelligent for high school but too young for adult life.

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"Our main reservations were related to his social life," his father, hydrogeologist Dr John Bradd, said. "So we actively make sure he keeps up with his friends from school on weekends and when he's not at uni."

Transitioning: Jacob Bradd, pictured at 13 in 2012 when he completed his first HSC maths extension exam.Credit:Kirk Gilmour

Transitioning to university at a young age is increasingly being used in Australia to meet the needs of highly intelligent students, according to a paper by academics from the University of NSW to be published in the January 2015 issue of Roeper Review.

One of the co-authors, Jae Yup Jared Jung, has been researching the career decisions of gifted students and says very few regret being accelerated.

"In fact, many would have preferred to have accelerated further or started their acceleration earlier," he said.

Without skipping a few years of school, these students are not only understimulated but they are often at risk of becoming bored, disengaged and socially isolated.

Youngest: Jonah Soewandito, 11, scored more than 90 in both chemistry and maths.Credit:Edwina Pickles

Each year in NSW and Victoria, a handful of students sitting the HSC and VCE are significantly younger than their classmates.

Jessica Kong from Our Lady of Sion College in Melbourne's Box Hill sat the VCE at 13-years-old in 2011 and planned to study biomedicine at university.

The youngest student to sit the HSC this year was 11-year-old Jonah Soewandito from The Scots College, who will graduate in 2015 after completing his remaining subjects.

Dr Jung says about 35 of 40 universities in Australia have no minimum age requirement "as long as the student has finished his or her high school requirements".

But at Monash University, you must be 17 years of age to enrol unless you have both an ATAR of 95 and approval of the dean of the faculty. The minimum age for study at RMIT is 16 unless the dean provides written permission.

Many universities, including the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University and the University of New England and in Victoria, Melbourne, Monash and Deakin, universities, however, offer dual study programs, allowing students to undertake university study while finishing secondary school.

Australian research has generally found accelerated students have positive experiences at university, both intellectually and socially.

Jacob Bradd says he prefers university learning to high school.

"At university they get you to actually learn things yourself, instead of school where they tell you everything and get you to do it a certain way," he said.

The main concern about accelerating students is that they will suffer socially.

But Dr Jung and his colleagues have found intellectually advanced children tend to gravitate towards older friends.

That was certainly true for David Ferris, who sat HSC mathematics in 2006 at the age of 12 before graduating high school at 14.

This year the 20-year-old finished his fifth year of a double degree in mathematics and electrical engineering at the University of Newcastle.

"During the orientation week I was mistaken for a starting student and I was like 'I've been here for five years now'." he said.

"When you're at school, a lot of people will consider you to be the young kid or the smart kid," he said. "When I got into university there are people who are younger and there are mature age students, so you've got a wide range of people who are all there just to learn and find out more things about the universe."

Ferris says one issue accelerated students might struggle with is "making life-long decisions about your future when you're substantially younger than everyone else".

"There are some people who, at the age of 14, still want to be firemen when they grow up," he said.

"[But] even if at the end of the day I had regretted it, I'd be regretting it at the age of 18."